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Duncan Wheeler, University of Leeds

Spains bullfighting season traditionally kicks off in February in Valdemorillo, a small town located approximately 40km outside of Madrid. It wouldnt usually attract big names, but in 2022, star matador Morante de la Puebla has confirmed his appearance. In a profession characterised by internal divisions, there is a growing sense that the coming season needs to be a success if bullfighting is not to disappear altogether.

Bullfighting has been banned in Catalonia since 2011, but in the rest of the country, the conversation has switched since the onset of the pandemic. Where once the debate focused on prohibition, the question now is whether a lifeline ought to be granted to this ailing cultural industry. The current left-wing coalition government appears not to have the political will to explicitly prohibit what was once known as the national fiesta, or, conversely, to provide support to keep it running. Hence, for example, tickets for corridas were pointedly excluded from a scheme announced by prime minister Pedro Snchez in October last year, whereby young people would be given 400-euro cultural passes to prop up various sectors.

Bullfights are reviewed in the arts rather than the sports sections of Spanish newspapers and fall under the purview of the Ministry of Culture. Declared illegal by the Spanish constitutional court in 2016, the Catalan ban was as much about political grandstanding as protecting animal rights. In the wake of the 2017 illegal independence referendum, the xenophobic and anti-immigration Vox party exploited anti-Catalan and pro-bullfighting sentiment in its campaigning and has become the third-biggest force in Spanish politics. Morante de la Puebla often joins party leader Santiago Abascal on the campaign trail.

But Vox has more to gain from the relationship than bullfighters, especially in rural areas where Abascals party has successfully attracted single-issue pro-bullfighting and hunting voters. The far-right has provided some protection for the profession, but it has also turned it into a more highly prized target. An increasing number of progressive citizens have a visceral dislike of bullfighting because it is seen as the last bastion for reactionaries with no place in a 21st-century European democracy.

In the cultural wars of contemporary Spain, the anti-bullfighting lobby is often too quick to brand aficionados as the cigar-smoking relics of the Francoist regime. Defenders of the national fiesta, meanwhile, preclude any debate on its future by dismissing all potential objections out of hand as manifestations of puritanical censorship. As a result, it is virtually impossible to have a serious debate on bullfighting, an emotive subject which has been weaponised by politicians across the ideological spectrum.

At the local level, city councils have no legal jurisdiction to issue a blanket ban, but they can withhold licences. In the northern coastal town of Gijon, socialist mayor Ana Gonzlez has announced the municipal bullring will from now on be used for live music rather than corridas. Her decisions came after, in her words, a line was crossed: two bulls killed last summer were named El nigeriano (The Nigerian) and another El feminista (The Feminist). The presence of Morante de la Puebla at the event gave this the look of a deliberate provocation, but was probably a coincidence. Fighting bulls inherit their names from their mother, so these monikers will have been handed down to the bulls from previous generations rather than having been thought of afresh. That said, exceptions have been made in the past. The first bull faced by the legendary Manolete as a fully fledged matador in 1939 had been baptised El Comunista (The Communist) under the short-lived Second Republic (1931-36). Such a name was anathema following General Francos victory in the Civil War (1936-39) and The Communist was diplomatically renamed El mirador (The Viewer).

Either way, the case is an example of how the bullfighting lobby has become something of an echo chamber. There is often a failure to understand how it is perceived from the outside. An open letter by the president of the Fighting Bulls Association was a gift to satirists, with its claims that the closure of the Gijon venue was somehow comparable to the destruction of religious artefacts by fundamentalists:

The Taliban, much like the Mayor of Gijon, forget that neither the Buddhas of Bamiyan nor the bulls belong to them, but are rather common heritage of mankind.

In Gonzlezs view, aficionados have had their way for too long, and now is the time to listen to the many citizens of Gijon who oppose bullfighting. In recent years, animal rights activists have organised large demonstrations outside of the bullring. During the pandemic, they have taken the moral high ground by staying at home while accusing the impresario of posing a danger to public (as well as animal) health.

Even ignoring the abolitionist movement, bullfighting is a broken business model. It faces particular challenges that will make survival even harder as the pandemic lingers. Spains premiere bullrings (Bilbao, Madrid, Pamplona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza), have been largely inactive for two years. But with an ageing audience and some social distancing measures likely to remain in place, the return of corridas requires a sacrifice from matadors and breeders. They will have to significantly reduce their fees if impresarios are to break even.

There are fixed costs associated with bullfighting that make it difficult to do on a smaller scale. Tales of the demise in popularity appear much exaggerated when major corridas can attract 10,000 plus spectators, but a handful of elite matadors aside, fewer contracts are on the table as provincial rings close. Much like the pandemic, there will probably not be a specific day on which bullfighting ends, but it seems unlikely to thrive in its current guise for much longer.

Duncan Wheeler, Professor in Spanish Studies, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Coronavirus and culture wars: Spains bullfighting industry faces a crunch point in 2022 - Qrius

Prince Charles has no doubt learned patience in his wait for the top job. Hes certainly a dab hand at playing the long game. His campaign against modern architecture began with a 1984 speech at Londons historic Hampton Court where he rubbished a proposed extension to the National Gallery as a monstrous carbuncle. The scheme was promptly dropped. As heir to the throne, he said, with no apparent self-consciousness, he saw it as a problem that the avant-garde had become the establishment. He went on to build Poundbury, his Classical-style model village outside the Dorset town of Dorchester. Charles also set up his Institute of Architecture among whose six founding principles was to build beautifully.

Alongside the prince were traditionalists such as the tweedy culture warrior Sir Roger Scruton, who blamed the dissolute 1960s for societal decay and believed, against all the evidence, that beauty was not only unchanging and eternal but linked to morality. This was amid the 1980s culture wars that set Thatcherism against the so-called political correctness of local councils.

Three decades later, the culture wars are again in full swing. The apoplexy with which governments have responded to calls to topple monuments since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 is not surprising but needs to be seen in this same contexta struggle for cultural hegemony.

This time around, the traditionalist lunatics have succeeded in taking over the asylum. Reactionary ideas hostile to the cosmopolitan, to Modernism, to modernity itself, are in the ascendant. Tory placemen (and they are generally men) are being appointed to the boards of cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the BBC. The thoroughly middle-class National Trust is under attack as woke for exploring colonialism (a similar report by English Heritage several years earlier provoked nothing like the same outrage). Laws are proposed that would hand out longer sentences for damaging a statue than for rape. A government retain and explain policy for monuments essentially amounts to retain everything and explain nothing.

This is not unique to Britain, of coursejust look at Viktor Orbn in Hungary or the history wars in Poland, or the manufactured outrage by the Macron government over Islamo-gauchisme and mosques or other visual expressions of Islam. Switzerland, Spain and Denmark are among other countries gripped by minaret-phobia. In Germany and Eastern Europe, modern post-war city centres are being rebuilt as ersatz historic quarters full of fake traditional architecture. The same thing was happening under Donald Trump, who issued an executive order demanding that all new federal buildings be in a Classical style. Beauty and tradition have become dog-whistle words to white supremacists drunk on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that sees a cultural genocide of Christian Europe at the hands of immigrants. Classicism is not inherently right-wing but traditional architecture has become a vehicle of choice for the Right and Far Right.

Traditionalist city-making ideas have been brewing for some time, now pushed by right-wing think-tanks such as the Policy Exchange and Legatum Institute, who are hostile to both public housing and fetters on the market, and whose adherents are now in government. Policy Exchange reports inspired the governments Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, headed by the late Sir Roger that pushed a traditionalist architectural agenda. Among the outcomes are proposed design codes for areas that would make it hard for council planners to resist developers who tick the codes boxes. A key figure is Scruton acolyte Nicholas Boys Smith, a former financier and adviser to former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who succeeded Scruton at the Building Better Commission. He set up Create Streets, which champions traditional city-making, and is now an Historic England commissioner as well as heading up the governments new Office for Place.

Despite explicitly aiming to promote beauty, the opposite is more likely because it all interlocks with a bonfire of planning controls. These make it easy, for example, to turn houses and offices into substandard housing without planning permission and reduce the publics right to object to proposals. A planning White Paper would upend the post-war system creating simplified zones to encourage development. It is as if a Georgian speculative builders pattern book could be applied to the 21st century.

For the moment at least, the worst excesses of the style traditionalists have been frustrated: a proposed fast track through planning for development deemed beautiful seen as unworkable, for instance. The White Paper is being reviewed after the Tories lost last years Chesham and Amersham by-election, partly because of electors fears of the countryside being concreted. The direction of travel, however, remains.

Monuments, where values and historical narratives coalesce, are simply the obvious pointy end of this culture war. In many ways they are a distraction. In Britain at least, the insidious iceberg is traditionalism hand-in-glove with free marketeers intent on handing developers free rein.

Robert Bevan is a member of the Mayor of Londons Diversity in the Public Realm Commission, which is holding a round table on contested heritage this month. He is writing in a personal capacity. His book, Monumental Lies: Culture Wars & the Truth About the Past, will be published later this year by Verso

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The ugly pursuit of beauty: how traditional architecture has become a battleground for right-wing politicians - Art Newspaper

OPINION:

Let us now digress from my usual preoccupation, which is politics, to the world of athletics or to the world of athletics as it is affected by culture wars. Of course, culture wars are politics by another name. Alas, we never can completely escape politics. If I wanted to write this week about cuisine at some point, I fear I would be capitulating to politics, for instance: how politics affects linguini or chop suey or beef. Politics is everywhere nowadays. I think the reason is that what was once called liberalism (and is now called the left) has spread into everything. Yet I shall restrain myself this week and talk only about athletics. Really, politics is a bore.

Now the sport I know best is swimming. I spent my early years swimming from one end of a pool to the other for as many as six miles a day. Swimming is one of those sports where men often train with women. Perhaps that is why I chose swimming. At any rate, we trained together. However, we did not compete with each other for obvious reasons at least they were obvious when I was young.

In every swimming event, the men surpassed the women. Men were stronger and this may seem controversial meaner or at least more competitive. Perhaps this is changing, but I am always reminded of a very dear friend who held many world records. One day she told me how she did it. It was elegance. She did not try to crush the opposition as men often do. She was concerned about her stroke mechanics: Her pull, her kick, and she usually won. Incidentally, by the time she entered college, she had dropped out of swimming. As I recall, it was something about her shoulders becoming too hefty.

This brings to mind another story from the world of athletics involving women. One evening I appeared on television with Pete Rozelle, the head of the National Football League. We were appearing with a leading feminist, who, by the way, was built like a linebacker. She proclaimed that the time would come when women would be as big as men, and they would be competing with men in the NFL. All that held womankind back, she said, was institutional sexism. That was some 50 years ago, and her promised epiphany has not taken place yet.

Today women who seek to compete in sports are faced with the most perverse threat imaginable: Biological males are dominating their sports events. And where are the feminists? For the most part, they seem to be supporting the male interlopers. What is more, where are the liberals? They remain silent, or they support the interlopers. The people claim to be transgender, and I guess they can compete as women in womens athletics or as men or whatever else they want to claim. How about as angels?

What can women do to preserve womens sports? I thought for a while the women swimmers could simply don flippers and power themselves through the water with a stronger kick than the trans crowd, but these fellows (or fellowesses) are smart. Their response is to strap on their own pair of flippers. What will the ladies do next, strap on hand paddles?

Well, I have come up with a solution that ought to placate everyone. Americans of a certain forward-leaning persuasion relish being on the side of progress. The trans crowd is certainly drawn from this sector of Americano. They and their advocates should claim that they represent the latest evolution of the species, the third sex, the trans sex. Why should excellence in sport be denied the third sex?

Henceforth there will be male swimming events, female swimming events and trans swimming events. Anyone who would deny trans people the right to compete against other trans people is simply behind the times. Surely the NCAA and the AAU will sanction the third-sex movement. It is only a matter of time before the United States Olympic Committee takes a stand for trans athletes everywhere.

At the outset of this column, I said that I would avoid politics, but I see that I have failed. As I also said, politics is everywhere today. It has even entered the swimming pool. Yet I have offered a solution to the trans threat. It is perfectly reasonable. We shall have a world record for the males, one for the females and one for the trans athletes. My only question is what sort of swimwear they might wear. I shall leave that question for the experts.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author most recently of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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How to preserve women's sports - Washington Times

This year marks the centennial anniversary of one of the most famous sermons from the culture wars of the 1920s: Harry Emerson Fosdicks Shall the Fundamentalists Win?

The 34-year-old Fosdick, whose eloquent presentation of the modernist cause had already landed him one of the most prestigious pulpits in the nation, was eager to lead the charge against the fundamentalists, who he warned would destroy Christianity if they succeeded in wresting control of the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations from the irenic moderate liberals who did not want to make biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, or a belief in the virgin birth a litmus test for the Christian faith. Fosdicks excoriation of the fundamentalists has become a classic primary source text on the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s, and many college history professors (myself included) have assigned it in our classes alongside one of William Jennings Bryans speeches against evolution in order to give students first-hand perspectives on both sides of the debate.

But that debate has not played out quite like Fosdick expected. Now that we have reached the centennial anniversary of this sermon, perhaps its time to ask the question: Did the fundamentalists win? The answer is not as clear as anyone would have likely expected at the time.

For the first half-century after Fosdicks sermon, many observers probably would have concluded that the fundamentalists lost. Fosdick had warned that the fundamentalists were engaged in a hostile takeover of the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations that would, if it succeeded, purge the denominations of those who wanted to harmonize Christianity with modern science and historical criticism of the Bible. Fundamentalists lost their fights in both of those denominations. While small groups of fundamentalists left each of those denominations to found more conservative groups (such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches), those denominations were tiny compared to their mainline counterparts, and they rarely made news headlines. The mainline continued to control all of the major seminaries and divinity schools that had been at stake in the intradenominational battles over institutional control. And their political influence appeared to be far stronger at least if measured by presidential church affiliations or media attention than the fundamentalists had.

Nor did the anti-evolution forces make much headway in the North. Although several southern states passed laws in the 1920s restricting the teaching of evolution, no state north of the Mason-Dixon line did so. And even if high school biology textbooks across the nation minimized their presentation of evolutionary theory in deference to southern preferences from the 1930s until the early 1960s, college classrooms with only a few fundamentalist exceptions taught evolution as accepted fact, and many college-educated Protestants in the North may have assumed that the controversy was more-or-less over. The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism, the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote in 1958 in his historical survey of the United States in the 1920s. Ostensibly successful on every front, the political fundamentalists in the 1920s were making a last stand in a lost cause.

But in the last half-century, the answer to Fosdicks question Shall the fundamentalists win? could quite plausibly be answered in the affirmative. In the late twentieth century, a politically resurgent conservative evangelicalism gained national political influence and replaced a numerically declining mainline Protestantism as the public representation of Protestant Christianity in much of the media. Conservative evangelicals revived the political fights over how human origins were taught in public schools, as well as over what was taught in seminaries. It might have been too late to reclaim Princeton Theological Seminary let alone the University of Chicago Divinity School but the conservative evangelicals of the late twentieth century made a successful bid to purge the evolutionists and advocates of historical criticism from places such as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and capture control of much of divinity training in the United States. And when a Gallup Poll asked Americans in 1983 whether they believed that God had directly created human beings in their present form (as opposed to a divinely guided evolutionary process or an unguided evolution that occurred without divine involvement, which were the two other choices in the survey), a plurality of 44 percent said that indeed, God had directly created humans in their present form, as young-earth creationists insisted. Perhaps the anti-evolutionists had not been quite as defeated as Leuchtenburg assumed.

Yet to say that the fundamentalists won would not exactly be true either. Instead, we have experienced a religious and cultural fragmentation, with a much greater range of opinions than Fosdicks sermon may have suggested.

Fosdicks sermon suggested that there were only two alternatives for Christianity: Either it could become irrelevant among educated modern people if fundamentalists insisted on making belief in unscientific ideas (such as special creation or biblical miracles) a litmus test, or it could update its views to accommodate modern science and remain a relevant force as a liberal religion. But, contrary to Fosdicks expectations, conservative (even fundamentalist) forms of Christianity continued to draw adherents from educated people in the late 20th century and beyond.

The ready acceptance of biblical literalism even in educated circles in the late 20th and early 21st century might have seemed to be a fundamentalist victory, but it was also aided by a religious pluralism that was the result of liberal Protestant epistemology that grounded religious truth claims in personal experience.

In the 1920s, many American fundamentalists, like most 19th-century Protestants, believed that truth claims about religion could be tested empirically and objectively. The Bibles claims could be tested with historical and scientific evidence, they thought. Liberal Protestants who accepted historical criticism did not agree. Influenced by the German liberal Protestant theology that could be traced back to Friedrich Schleiermacher, they wanted to reground the epistemological foundation for religion in experience.

By the end of the 20th century, most Americans of all religious stripes seemed to accept the liberal Protestant idea that religion would have to be grounded in personal experience. The liberal Protestants of the early 20th century had not necessarily believed that the experiential grounding of religion had to be strictly personal; collective societal experience also played a role. Nevertheless, in the individualistic culture of late 20th-century America, the idea that religious faith was based on experiences that were strictly personal became widely accepted among Americans of many religious faiths, as well as those with none at all. That helped fundamentalists (or, as most preferred to be called in the late 20th century, evangelicals) win a public toleration they had not enjoyed before at least if they avoided politicizing their religion or using their beliefs as justification for restricting the rights of others, which was not always the case. Fundamentalists might still feel like a beleaguered minority, but their biblical literalism per se rarely elicits the sort of public mockery that Clarence Darrow adopted at the Scopes trial or in which H. L. Mencken engaged. If religion is grounded in personal experience, its hard for anyone to critique anothers faith, which has helped theologically conservative Christians at times.

But within Protestantism, the result has been not only a widespread acceptance of religious pluralism (which liberal Protestants welcomed) but also an increasing religious fragmentation. Protestantism is not merely dividing into fundamentalist and liberal camps, as appeared to be the case in Fosdicks era; instead, there are a multitude of increasingly isolated camps that cannot form a unified coalition on the contentious cultural issues. Forty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention was divided between conservatives and moderates. Twenty years ago, those conservatives began experiencing divisions in their own camp over Calvinism. Now even the conservatives who can agree on Calvinist doctrine are splitting with each other over exactly how to interpret and apply gender complementarianism in their congregations or how exactly the denomination should respond to critical race theory. Conservative Presbyterians who agree on Reformed theology and biblical inerrancy are at odds with each other over issues of racial justice.

Across the evangelical spectrum, one no longer finds two clear camps but instead a multitude of siloed parties that disagree with others on both their left and their right. One can find gender complementarian advocates of racial justice, for instance, who are alienated from anti-CRT people on their right and gender egalitarians on their left. One can find social justice-minded (but sexually conservative) gender egalitarians who are alienated from the social justice complementarians on their right because of their stance on women in ministry but also from advocates of LGBTQ rights on their left because of their opposition to same-sex marriage. And this does not even take into account the further divisions that might be occurring as a result of disagreements over COVID protocols or national politics. As a result, evangelicalism appears not merely to be splitting but to be dividing into several different camps. And while the mainline appears to be less divided than evangelicalism, it has not been able to escape the contemporary culture wars unscathed, as the splintering of the Episcopal and United Methodist churches over LGBTQ issues has demonstrated.

The contemporary divisions among Protestants have been exacerbated by a national cultural fragmentation that is partly the result of a loss of epistemological authority beyond the personal. In Fosdicks day, fundamentalists and modernists were battling over the future theological direction of northern Protestantism and, by extension, the nations leading institutions of influence. But today there are not many national religious lodestars over which to battle. American religion has become too fragmented, with too many competing options, for there to be a new fundamentalist-modernist division. Instead of two parties, we have a plethora of options, and it is too early to say whether these competing factions will be able to form unified coalitions with other groups.

So, did the fundamentalists win? They certainly endured for far longer than Fosdick had hoped. But neither the liberals nor the fundamentalists were able to capture control of American Protestantism in the way they had anticipated, and today were experiencing a fissiparous splintering of American Protestant Christianity on a scale that neither side in the controversy imagined. If the 1920s is commonly seen as the era when American Protestantism divided into two major factions, perhaps the 2020s will eventually be seen as the moment when American evangelicalism and, to a certain extent, American Protestantism in general split into multiple competing groups because of the culture war issues. So, perhaps were nearing the moment when the fault line between evangelicals and mainline Protestants will matter less than the multiple fault lines within these two camps. If that is the case, the question Shall the fundamentalists win? might be the wrong one to ask. Perhaps the real question now is: Will any faction in American Protestantism win?

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Did the Fundamentalists Win? A Centennial Retrospective - Patheos

Ice? Snow? Itll depend on where you live in South Carolina, but a winter storm is expected to sweep through Saturday night, possibly bringing 2 inches of snow or more north of Interstate 85. The Charleston area could see some ice, while the Midlands is bracing for lots more ice and possible snow. More:WYFF,Spartanburg Herald-Journal,The State,The Post and Courier

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State senators debate state law requiring state permission for hospital expansion.South Carolina senators began a debate Wednesday over whether to wipe a state law requiring hospitals and medical clinics to receive state permission to expand. The Certificate of Need program first sought to distribute medical care around the state, but supporters of a bill that would end the program said it is no longer needed. More:AP News,The State,The Post and Courier

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Thursday headlines: Wintry mix, snow in forecast for this weekend in SC - Charleston City Paper